Europe's Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900 (Politics, History, and Culture) - Softcover

Seth, Vanita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822347644 ISBN 13: 9780822347644

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self–other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, Seth argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vanita Seth is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies.

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"In this original and exciting work, Vanita Seth shows how European ways of knowing changed and how as they changed, certain 'truths' were established, verified, habituated, and naturalized, so that the previous way of knowing was occluded and rendered unthinkable. Moving from a history of science into political theory, shifting from a European philosophical tradition into questions of postcolonialism, and historically specifying in new ways the question of race as a very modern invention, Seth makes an enormous contribution."--Pal Ahluwalia, author of "Out of Africa: Post-structuralism's Colonial Roots"

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Europe's Indians

PRODUCING RACIAL DIFFERENCE, 1500-1900By Vanita Seth

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4764-4

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................................ixIntroduction.........................................................................................................11 Self and Similitude RENAISSANCE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD..................................................192 "Constructing" Individuals and "Creating" History SUBJECTIVITY IN HOBBES, LOCKE, AND ROUSSEAU.....................613 Traditions of History MAPPING INDIA'S PAST........................................................................1194 Of Monsters and Man THE PECULIAR HISTORY OF RACE..................................................................173Epilogue.............................................................................................................227Notes................................................................................................................233Bibliography.........................................................................................................259Index................................................................................................................279

Chapter One

Self and Similitude

RENAISSANCE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD

Self and Other: Figures of Modernity

IT HAS BECOME an increasingly common feature in contemporary writings on European colonialism to articulate the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of self and other, West and non-West. While the narrative I allude to is all too familiar, it is a narrative that, nevertheless requires unpacking.

Simply put, when we speak of the self in opposition to the non-European other, are we appealing to a metaphysical rendering of the West as an entity that, following Nietzsche, can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, or are we to understand the conceptual grid of self-other as a historically bounded reference to modernity-one that locates the West-as-self within the context of the post-Enlightenment?

If it is the former, if it is a metaphysical category to which we are appealing, implicit in our understanding is a recognition that the West-non-West binary has always already inhabited the conceptual geography of self-other-at least as far back as classical antiquity. In other words, the West has always already been a self-referential subject. Alternatively, if we seek to subject the self-other narrative to historical specificity, if we wish to situate it within the world of the modern, our premise by necessity has to presuppose that the oppositional apparatus of the West-non-West binary was indebted to a particular set of historical conditions, whether these be capitalist economic relations and Enlightenment universalism, the emergence of nation-states and a distinctively modern form of governmentality, or the ascendance of science and reason and the catch-cry of secularism.

It becomes apparent, therefore, that when we speak of self and other, we need to be alert to the fact that, from this point of reference, we can traverse two radically distinct theoretical terrains-one that is organized around the trans-historical sign of the West, and the other that subjects the West to historical specificity. As I will go on to argue, the distinction drawn is an important one, and yet in some of the contemporary literature engaging with the production of the Western self and non-Western other, there often appears an ambiguity, a "collapsing together" wherein metaphysics and history intermingle in a confused interchangeability.

Illustrative of my point is Edward Said's decidedly seminal text Orientalism (1978). Said's work provides a now canonical reading of European colonialism through the conceptual grid of self-other, the Occident-Orient. In so doing, he renders a more complex appreciation of power wherein power is identified not simply with bullets, governance, and wealth extraction but with the very production of knowledge.

The fact that Said engages with nineteenth-century European literature and the twentieth-century North American academy is suggestive of the fact that he situates the oppositional binary Occident-Orient within the template of modernity. And yet while Said encloses his subject matter within a historical frame, this temporal imposition coexists with a temporal transcendence, a constant oscillation between the category of the West and the category of the modern. What is implicit throughout Said's thesis becomes explicit when he argues: "In classical Greece and Rome geographers, historians, public figures like Caesar, orators and poets added to the fund of taxonomic lore separating races, regions, nations and minds from each other; much of that was self-serving and existed to prove that the Romans and Greeks were superior to other kinds of people."

What we witness in Said's text, dramatized in the quote, is the collapsing together of Julius Caesar's Rome and the reign of Queen Victoria. Yet what remains a largely ambiguous positioning of the Classical period in Said's work finds full expression in Franois Hartog's thesis that Herodotus's Histories represents one of the earliest expressions of the Greeks' efforts to understand their neighbors through radical opposition. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, as the title suggests, offers an in-depth textual reading of Histories from an interpretative position that construes Herodotus's references to the Persians, Scythians, Libyans, and other non-Greeks as emblematic examples of the representational production of self-other in classical antiquity.

While Hartog's Mirror of Herodotus provides both an insightful and sophisticated reading of the Histories, the interpretation of the Histories as a text of otherness has a currency that goes beyond the jacket of his book. If Said oscillated from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century Europe, more contemporary works have found no hesitation in mapping Herodotus's Histories over Renaissance representations of the New World. Thus, in a work concerned with first contact between Spanish voyagers and indigenous Americans, Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions retraces the roots of European constructions of the other back to Herodotus, whose ethnology, he argues, constitutes "the first great Western representation of Otherness." In a similar vein, Michel de Certeau parallels the Histories with Michel de Montaigne's famous essay On Cannibals, suggesting that both function as texts that offer "a representation of the other."

In works as different as that of Said, Hartog, Greenblatt, and Certeau-works that engage with radically distinct intellectual projects-a shared theoretical premise nevertheless exists: that it is possible to speak of the West as an entity that extends itself back to antiquity, an entity that is malleable to all historical conditions. Thus, implicit in this narrative is the contention that one can traverse centuries, from the dizzying peaks of Greek and Roman civilization to the glory of European imperialism, and encounter, throughout this breathless history, a self-defining identity of the West as conceived through the oppositional representation...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822347644
• ISBN 13: 9780822347644
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland